This application requests support for one year to conduct one scientific meeting on the general topic of aging in developing (middle- and low-income) countries. A unique feature of this meeting is that it will bring together scholars from a variety of countries across the globe, including Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Scholars from developed countries will be included to foster collaborations across researchers from developed/developing countries, to share experiences in data collection in disparate settings, to discuss similarities and dissimilarities of the aging processes in both regions of the world, and to encourage and offer guidelines for conducting systematic comparative research. This conference is timely since it will take advantage of several very recent experiences in data collection on elderly people in developing and developed countries and is designed to enlighten, facilitate, and improve the design of several studies that are currently being planned, particularly in developing countries. The meeting will highlight what is unique about aging in developing countries and what is shared with aging in higher income countries. Accordingly, it will identify the type of information required to rigorously study such processes as well as the instruments and protocols that appear most suitable given the uniqueness and commonalities of aging processes. This meeting will help to identify what are the optimal study designs for studying several dimensions of the aging processes in different parts of the world. For the first time it will bring together investigators working on similar problems but on different demographic, social, economic, political and cultural contexts. The meeting may help to streamline efforts, to learn form each other's experiences, to make more uniform and hence comparable the data collection efforts, ongoing and forthcoming. As a consequence, this meeting is highly relevant for policy design not just for public health but also for policies related to labor force, income distribution, and pensions systems. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]